#413 Child Study 1 – Moving

Video 1:

The movements of the children are very simple and on the beat. All the children jump at the same time. Before they all jump at the end of the phrase, they are clapping together or dancing along to the beat. The movements of the older children are more complex than the ones of the younger ones. The younger kids look like they are struggling with moving left and right. The children know what to do because there is an adult showing them what to do and they follow. They are singing a call and response and the dancing is doing the same. I don’t think I would be able to do what the drummer is doing. I would not be coordinated enough for the rhythms he is playing.

Video 2:

This kind of dancing is like an improvisation. The dancers are staying with the beat of the music but are using moves that they think fit in to be able to beat the other person. The boy and girl are trying to show off to each other all the complex movements they know to win. To challenge in this dance is to show off to the other person and try to impress the crowd with your movements. The crowd is excited because they are impressed with the movements that the boy and girl are doing. They are getting on the ground to do some of their movements and they do movements that not many people can do. The children are also signaling to each other when they are dancing which get the crowd excited.

Video 3:

The child is leading in this video. The child looks very natural doing the movements where the adults look like they are trying very hard to make their movements look like the child. The child also looks very wobbly and the adults are very balanced trying to look like a wobbly child. When the child moves too fast, he gets unbalanced and makes him fall.

Videos 4a and 4b:

I noticed that the younger students had a hard time trying to move fast and transitioning to their new partner. They stumble a lot and stop. The older each group, the more they understood how to dance to the music. This might have to do with the fact that the older people have more experience doing it than the younger ones. The younger kids need support in trying to know what way to go or what the directions are. In the third video, the announcer was giving the children in depth directions with demonstrations. The older people could understand the announcer when they are speaking fast because they know how the dance goes. In the third video, the announcer had to speak her lines at half beat so that all the dancers could understand what to do.

Videos 5a, 5b, and 5c:

I think I would be able to do what the children are doing if I watched the videos multiple times and did it a lot. In the first video, they really did not teach me how to do it. They just did the hand clapping game as a demonstration. In the second video, the girls actually teach the clapping movements, but not the song. I think with this video I would be able to catch on to the movements faster than the song since it was broken down. In third video, there are multiple videos showing the hand challenge and there is one that breaks down how to do it. I think that hand challenge would be easier to do since it breaks it down and you get to see multiple people play it at different speeds. In each video with singing, the girls are able to sing it correctly and if they messed up, they did not care as much. They were enjoying making a video to show the game they knew.